


Excursion

by Xero_Sky



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Aliens, Chuck Hansen Lives, Creepy things, Dubious Science, Ghost Drifting, Horror, M/M, Post-Pitfall, Reality Shows, Sex, Sex Pollen, Yancy Becket Lives, lots of profanity, people who should know better, situationally dubious consent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-08-13 09:22:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7971625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xero_Sky/pseuds/Xero_Sky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Pitfall, the PPDC needs money and publicity.  For some reason, the idea of sending its finest out on a survival reality show seems like a good idea.  It's not. </p><p>Or:  Chuck Hansen and Raleigh Becket are released shirtless into the wild, and everything goes to hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Beginning...

This is, in a word, _stupid_.

In two words, it’s _fucking stupid_.

Somehow, Raleigh fucking Becket is the only other person here who realizes that.  And Chuck just has to make everything just a little bit worse than it had to be.

What the fuck is his life?

*******

“I am _not_ doing this naked.”

Raleigh wasn’t against the entire concept of survival training, and he sort of understood how this stunt – dumping two of the PPDC’s finest into the wilderness and filming them out there for three days – could be used as part of the push to rebrand the jaeger force for search and rescue, firefighting, and a billion other jobs that didn’t involve punching monsters in the face.  He even got why he had to go with Hansen, because, while Yancy could still pilot a jaeger, his prosthetics weren’t exactly made for fording streams and scrambling down hillsides. 

He had limits, though.

This last minute bullshit about going out there naked was definitely past them, and he wasn’t doing it.

“Since the Marshal’s only given us a few days with you, we thought that sending you out without any gear at all would have the biggest impact,” one of the PR hacks said, repeating himself carefully as if Raleigh had somehow misheard him.

“Of course we’d blur out your actual privates in the final footage,” someone else added earnestly.

“Not gonna happen.”

“I can guarantee,” the director offered, “that no one is going to see anything you don’t want them to.”

They were standing at the end of a dirt road, with the crew and the security team setting up their gear.  There was almost fifty people there, not to mention the scary-ass PPDC operators who were already out there in the forest, making sure that there was no one else out there waiting for them.  Part of their reward for saving the world had been the bounties that various kaiju cults had put on their heads, and the PPDC had never skimped on protecting their own. 

Raleigh indicated all of these, present or not, with a big sweep of his arm.  “There’s like a hundred people out here already.”

Not to mention mosquitoes and flies and a hundred other things he didn’t really want up close and personal with his dick.  They were in a scenic patch of the Rockies, not the goddamned Outback, but that didn’t mean a spider bite on his junk was going to be any less horrifying.

He and Chuck were both kitted out in shorts, t-shirts, and hiking boots, and that was as far as he was going to go.  He shot a look at his partner and got a grim nod, which he mistook for total support.  The jerk’s next words were certainly a surprise, then.

“I’ll give up my shirt, but that’s all you’re getting.  Don’t need Raleigh here getting all hot and bothered.”

“Fuck off, Hansen.  Besides, you’re gonna burn to a crisp.”

“Sunblock’s allowed with the med kit,” Chuck returned serenely.  “You afraid I’ll make you look bad?”

He stripped off his shirt, showing off his sculpted chest and abs.  One of the camera guys actually scuttled over to make sure they got a good long look.

Raleigh knew what the asshole was doing, but he couldn’t keep from responding to it anyway.  The fucker might not know all his buttons, but he sure as hell pushed the ones he’d figured out.  Raleigh started pulling his own shirt over his head before he even realized it.

_Goddamnit._

“Whatever you say, dude.”  Trying to regain the high ground before he ended up running bare-assed through the woods, Raleigh crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at everyone in sight.  “We gonna get this show on the road or what?”

There was a moment of silence, and then he was being sprayed with sunblock by a PA who snuck up behind him.  She dropped the rest of the bottle into his stupid shoulder bag of supplies and then backed away.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her circling around to get at Chuck.

“Are you sure you won’t…?” someone started to ask, and Raleigh fixed an absolutely death glare on Chuck, who just smiled.  He seemed to realize that this path wouldn’t lead anywhere good, though.

“Any more than this and you’ll have to pay for it,” the classy fucker said, and Raleigh snorted. 

This was going to be the stupidest three days of his life.

*******

In the end, they only spent two days out there together.  A day, one night, and most of the next passed in a haze of general irritation.

*******

They argued about every single decision that needed to be made, but there weren’t actually that many yet.  The idea was that they had to get from Point A to Point B in three days, and maybe if there was any kind of suspense involved, they might be more invested.  The PPDC wouldn’t let its finest fall off a cliff or anything, and they both had a meeting with contractors on Thursday that they had to be there for.  The most they were realistically risking were broken bones or such, and even those could be healed up in a few weeks these days.  Sure, they’ve only got each other for company, but it’s hard to ignore the long and close-range drones recording their every movement.  They don’t see the security guys, but they don’t expect to, either. 

Raleigh went hunting and fishing as a kid, because he was an Alaskan kid and that’s what his French mother decided Alaskans did.  She’d ended up leading most of their family expeditions, because their father was hopeless anywhere outside of cellphone coverage, and the Beckets had gained a certain expertise through trial, error, and his mother’s sheer stubbornness.  What he still remembered of it all had been supplemented by the basic survival classes he’d had at the Jaeger Academy, but he wasn’t really in his element out here.

Chuck would have been worse off, except that Chuck had studied up on all this the second his father had told them about it, and Chuck soaked up knowledge like plants did sunlight.  He gathered the few edible plants they came across, and when they finally set up camp that night, he set up a shelter while Raleigh got a fire started. 

When Raleigh grinned triumphantly at him, having mastered the primeval forces of Fire, Chuck just shook his head and handed over half of their pathetic dinner.

They didn’t talk much in between arguments, and that night was no different.  Part of that was the normal awkwardness between people who’d never mastered the arts of small talk.  Most of it came from hearing the soft whirring of the camera drones at the edge of the firelight, and knowing that, somewhere out there, somebody was probably watching them through a night scope. Being for their own safety did not make it any less creepy.

They slept back to back that night, pressing bare skin to bare skin because it was fucking cold out.  The shelter blocked most of the wind, thankfully.  They knew it wasn’t what the crew expected, but it wasn’t like they hadn’t huddled together with their co-pilots before, either waiting out the ghost drift or trying to keep warm while waiting for the Jumphawks to pick them up.  (No one had ever gotten around to installing heaters of any kind in the connpods.)  Sharing some body heat just would be the big deal the show had hoped for.  They’d figured that there’d be vastly more drama involved before either of them allowed the other that close, and, for once, the Rangers didn’t deliver.

The only things that made sleep hard to find were the distance from their co-pilots, which was a hard thing for partners who’d drifted as long as they had, and the silence.  They were men of machines, and the dead quiet was unsettling.  When the night vision camera turned up and hovered overhead, the sound was actually a comfort, no matter how fucking annoying being filmed like this was.

*******

Chuck woke up and stretched, knowing perfectly well where he was and who he was with and, thus, how awkward this was going to be.  He was warm, though, and relatively comfortable, and he couldn’t hear anything man-made or just human moving around, so, yeah, he took a minute or four to get up. 

This whole thing was still profoundly stupid, but it was also a third over, and he knew all too well what it was like to find brief happy moments and hoard them to get him through the day.  It hadn’t been the worst time so far, though.  He had basically zero experience outdoors, but he did have full confidence that he and Raleigh could manage not to fuck it up.  They were both capable, competent, and stubborn assholes, and Raleigh was far from the last person he would choose to be out here with.

He wondered idly if Raleigh had figured it out yet.  The only reason he even bothered to argue with the stupid sod was because he’d proved himself worth the time.  That was rare, in Chuck’s opinion.  He’d never waste time on anyone who couldn’t take it and dish it back just as hard.

That was a pretty fucking shite way of dealing with people, he realized, but it wasn’t like he had much else to judge people on.  You need strong people to go to war with, and that was what he’d always looked for.  To be honest, it hadn’t let him down yet.

He still freely admitted that he was a jerk, though.

Which explained why he was out here without his bloody shirt in the first place.  _Nice work, Hansen._

Didn’t explain why he was pressed up against Becket like _this_ , though, spooning him with an arm around his waist.   All that warm skin against his own had managed to keep him a lot warmer than his shirt would’ve, he had to admit, but there was basically no way he could move without waking the man up to  the fact that he’d been snuggling him in their sleep.

_Christ._

He decided there was no hope for it and just sat up when he was ready, scrubbing at his face with both hands.  A moment later, Becket got up without a word and headed off into the bushes.  Chuck blinked for a couple of moments before realizing the man was just going off to take a piss.  Yawning, he turned his attention towards stoking up the fire.  It was cold now that he’d lost his heating blanket.

The world was mostly quiet this morning, except for the small sounds of birds and animals beginning another day.  There’d been a database online of birdsongs and such that someone with far more investment in all this outdoor shite had suggested memorizing, but that had seemed like overkill even to Chuck.  He didn’t really intend to spend much time out here after this idiocy was done with, thank you very much. 

The fire was going hot when Raleigh came back, and Chuck was about to take his own turn when something caught his eye.  A pair of rabbits were tussling with each other in the open space on the other side of the fire, climbing on each other and kicking.  The gray, twitchy things didn’t seem interested at all in either the fire or the humans, and –okay, they were fucking.  Right there in front of them, close enough that either man could have reached out and grabbed one, the rabbits were going at it like…  Yeah.

And showed no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Chuck got up, found a place to relieve himself that didn’t look ffull of poison ivy or deeply offended wildlife, and came back to find Raleigh staring intently at their map.  The possibly rabid bags of fur on the far side of the fire were still going at it.   A camera drone had arrived and was whirring patiently, waiting for them to do something entertaining.

Chuck flipped it off and sat down to take a good look at the map.

From what they could tell, they’d covered more ground than expected yesterday; if they kept it up at that rate, this whole shitshow could be over and done ahead of schedule. A suggested path was marked out, but they both felt like they were still in good condition, and the shortcut they plotted out seemed like it would take even more time off the whole trek. With that thought lightening their steps, they set off without more than some light bickering to get them going.

The rabbits, still not at all interested in them, continued their wicked ways, even when the fire got stamped out, sending dirt and debris their way.  It was more than a little creepy somehow – it just seemed _wrong_.  Not that either man was going to admit it out loud.  They had places to go and things to do, and they knew better by now than to give each other such cheap ammo for future arguments. 

Things had changed since Pitfall, but not enough to stop them from fighting, although it had only turned physical that one time.  Chuck hadn’t approved of virtually anything involved in reuniting the Beckets with Gipsy Danger, from the choice of restoring Gipsy instead of one of the Mark IVs, to the time and modifications it had taken to get Yancy back in the connpod after four years of substandard medical care.  It hadn’t really been personal, but it was inevitable that it turned that way.  Yancy mostly blew him off, but Raleigh wasn’t built the same way; he’d responded to every single challenge Chuck had thrown at them. 

They’d saved the world.  After that, Pentecost had gone on medical leave, Herc had become Marshal, and the remaining Rangers had turned to the task of rebuilding the jaeger corps.  They had done amazing things since then.

And Raleigh and Chuck had fought through it all, utterly devoted to ruining each other’s day as often as possible.  If they weren’t close enough to pick a fight in person, calling from the other side of the world to do it worked just as well. 

Most people worked around it.  Herc ignored it and expected them to do their goddamned jobs.  Yancy told them to just fuck and get it over with.  It was a known thing in the PPDC, and even if it didn’t make much sense to anyone, the world still turned and there was still enough work to keep everyone busy; it had turned into something of a spectator sport, something to keep tabs on like most people in the world followed soccer. 

There was currently a betting pool over which one would survive this trip.  It was at least half serious.  Rumor had it that the security teams were there to keep them safe from each other just as much as from the kaiju cults.  It was mostly a joke, though.

Mostly.

*******

Raleigh was tired and he was hungry, but being a Ranger rarely involved comfort, so he was used to a bit of misery most days.  His left shoulder ached fiercely from sleeping on the ground, but it wasn’t enough to hold him back.  Not with Hansen showing no signs of slowing down.

He could feel Yancy faintly in the drift, and that was always comforting, even though he knew the douchebag was getting a huge laugh out of all this.  You’d think he might have been all touchy and sensitive about his prosthetics disqualifying him for this, but, no, he was pretty happy about it.  Excessively happy, if you asked Raleigh. 

The drift brought him a sense of warmth and smug contentment, making him wonder if Yance was using Chuck’s absence as an opportunity to finalize his plans for getting in Herc’s pants.  He’d had a crush on the elder Hansen for years, since Manila really, and only Herc’s obliviousness, combined with Chuck’s world-class cock blocking skills, had kept the Marshal’s virtue safe from him.  It would be just like Yancy to make his move right now.

Trying to ferret as much information out of the drift as he could, Raleigh wasn’t paying enough attention to keep himself from tripping.  They were climbing a heavily wooded ridge, and Raleigh only slid a couple of feet down on his ass before a tree stopped him, but he picked up a nasty scrape across his back in the process.  He reached back to touch it, and his fingers came back bloody. He probably should get Chuck to look at it, he thought.  No matter how big a jerk he was, Hansen would put aside their bullshit to help him out if it was serious.  They both would, if it came to that, and they had proved it in the past.  He was about to swallow his pride when he caught sight of something that blanked his mind completely for a few seconds.

_Holy shit._

There was a flower about five feet to his left, growing next to a fallen log.  It was big and it was blue and it was almost completely out of place over there in the shade, a gaudy, tropical-looking thing with fat petals.

And it was eating a bird.

He shook his head and clamped his eyes shut, wondering if he’d hit his head.  But, no, the thing was still there when he looked again.  It was about a foot high and a dark, ugly green except for the bright blue blossom.  And that… That wasn’t exactly a blossom; it was more like a wide fringe around a gaping hole full of teeth.  There were no real leaves, exactly, just these tendrils that were pushing the struggling bird into the mouth.  As Raleigh watched, the mouth contracted around the bird’s head, and then the pretty blue fringe was stained with blood as a lump started working its way down the stem, like a snake swallowing a frog.

It was a beautiful, clear day out there, and he could hear the buzzing of insects, the wind in the trees overhead, and the distant sounds of other birds.  And this horror-show was just right there in the middle of it, like bird-eating flowers were a normal and sane part of the world.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered.

“You alright, mate?” Chuck asked from upslope.  He was sweaty and scowling a little, and Raleigh didn’t know what the hell to say to him, so he just pointed.  Chuck wasn’t able to see anything unusual from where he was, so when Raleigh remained silent, he snorted and came downhill in big strides, clearly annoyed.

“What the fuck is your—“His question was cut off cleanly, as with a knife, when he saw the flower.  It had a wing clamped in its teeth now, and was pulling the body back and forth with its tendrils, trying to tear it off.  Blood splattered from the severed neck.

He stopped in his tracks and turned an incredulous look on Raleigh, as if this was his fault.

Raleigh just shook his head slowly and stood up. 

“Is that…” Chuck tried after a minute, clearly trying to fit this into his idea of how the world worked, “…something you’ve got around here, like those flowers that eat flies or some such?”

“It’s blue,” Raleigh told him patiently.

“So what? Is that a yes or—“

Raleigh cut him off.  “It’s _blue_.  That fucking thing is blue.”

Chuck didn’t answer that, because Raleigh was right, and being blue was proof enough of what this had to be, and there was only one answer to that.  With a couple of big steps, he jumped high, landing on the flower with both feet.  It wasn’t exactly what Raleigh would have done, but he was okay with it, he really was.

There was a crunch, followed by a high pitched sound, and Chuck swore at it, twisting one boot heel to grind it into the dirt. It should have crushed it.  Instead, the flower _writhed_ under his feet, and dozens of tendrils suddenly boiled up from the ground around it to lash at Chuck’s boot, biting into the leather and rubber, and pulling hard.

With a shout, he hopped backwards awkwardly, trying to wrench his foot free and keep his balance, because that fucking thing was making this weird, rattling, hissing noise, and the very last thing he wanted in the _world_ right now was to be face to face on the ground with it.

Muscular arms suddenly wrapped around his waist and hauled him backward, and for a second he thought his ankle was gonna give way, and then the two of them were stumbling away as the thing let him go.  Horrified, they watched as the flower let out a low, loud moan before the whole thing, tendrils and all, retreated underground.  All that was left was a hole in the dirt, the remains of the bird, and a splash of something that both pilots immediately recognized by the smell.

It was Kaiju Blue.

It was puddled up on the dirt like the soil wouldn’t accept it, and even if it didn’t nearly fluoresce blue in the sunlight, the scent, like a hook in their throats, was unmistakable.  It was the same deadly shit the kaiju brought with them.  It was blood or sweat or maybe even actual shit, and it was the reason why every city they’d ever saved was still struggling with the poison left behind.  It was the reason jaegers were built in the first place, to try to keep the toxins offshore.

It doesn’t belong here, on this slope in the forest, in the middle of fucking nowhere.  It doesn’t belong on Earth.  Not anymore.

Raleigh let go and the two of them exchanged disbelieving looks with each other.  This wasn’t the scale they were used to, but there was no doubt where this thing came from.  Somehow. They need to report in immediately, and this whole place needs to be burned down to bare rock.

Chuck looked around for the drone that’d been following them all morning, but he didn’t see it.  He didn’t hear it either, and when Raleigh joined in, he couldn’t find a trace of it either.  What a perfect time to give them their goddamned privacy.

Waving his arms, Chuck called out for the security forces he knew had to be watching them.  They’ve been told not to interfere unless there’s an emergency, but this was a fucking emergency.

That’s exactly what he bellows at their invisible guards, and for all the good it did, he might as well have been asking to have a pizza delivered.

The only response to the sudden noise was a flickering of color across the forest floor, as dozens of blue flowers that hadn’t been there before suddenly disappeared from sight.  There was a sort of chittering sound from one direction and then another before fading into silence.

“WE ARE CALLING FOR RETRIEVAL RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!” Raleigh shouted, the hair standing up on the back of his neck. 

They waited, trying to keep quiet, listening for something, anything, that might tell them there were other people out there.  These woods should’ve been full of people pretending not to be there, right?

There’s nothing that even optimistically could be called a sign.

Stunned, the two pilots stared at each other as the moments built up into minutes.

“D’you think we lost them, with the shortcut?”                                                                

Raleigh shook his head, looking at their map.  “We’re still in the operation area.  They were supposed to already have people covering this whole area in case we did exactly that.”

He looked around them, wondering if the place is usually this quiet.  He can still hear birds in the distance, and that’s gotta be a good sign, right?  He thinks he remembers something about that from one of the guidebooks his mom had made him and Yancy read.  Or maybe it was one of the Stephen King books she adored.  Thanks, Mom.

“Maybe something got to them,” Chuck said after a while, because somebody had to say it. 

“Didn’t hear any gunfire.”

“Maybe they didn’t have time.”

“Those guys?  What the hell could sneak up on them?”

It was not a comforting thought.  “There should be another drone around pretty quick,” Raleigh offered.  “Do we wait for it to turn up?”

“What are our other options?”

They don’t have much in the way of actual emergency gear.  The challenge was to survive the whole trek without it, and besides, there was no way in hell the PPDC was going to let it’s billion-dollar jaeger pilots get lost out here, even if Chuck wasn’t the Marshal’s son.  Between the security and the show itself, they weren’t supposed to need anything like that themselves.  They don’t even have a radio.  They have a med kit, a map, a fire starter, a multi-tool, and a single flare, meant to guide help to their location if it was on the way.

Which, presumably, it was not.

“Let’s get up to the top of this ridge and see if we can find a clearing, maybe someplace to signal from.  They do a lot of aerial shots,” Raleigh decided.

It wasn’t much of a plan, and the look Chuck gave him made that perfectly clear, but it was all they had, so they set off, moving as quickly as they could in what felt like enemy territory now.  Chuck couldn’t stop thinking of that thing grabbing at his boot before it disappeared, and he watched his feet a lot as he went.

Fucking tentacles.  _Jesus._

Neither one of them doubted what they’d seen.  Second guessing has been almost trained out of them by now, at least in combat.  And this felt like combat, even though they made it to the top of the slope without anything else showing itself to them.  They couldn’t hear anything besides their boots on the ground and the sound of their own harsh breathing, and that was more unnerving that anything else.  More than once they turned quickly to see if anything was following them, as if they could catch it in the light if they were fast enough.  Seeing nothing out of the ordinary was not as comforting as it should be.

The crest of the ridge wasn’t that far off, and they followed it up.  After a few minutes’ walk, the trees conceded a relatively open spot to the stony ground, and there was a clear view of the valley below and the hills beyond.  They lit the flare, waving it over their heads and hoping that the bright light and smoke would draw somebody’s attention.  Chuck wasn’t even 100% sure they were facing the right direction, but he was just as enthusiastic about hopping around like an idiot as Raleigh, because he really didn’t want to spend another night out here.

It took some time, but eventually they did see a flash in the distance, as if there was something airborne on the far side of the valley.  Almost immediately after that, it didn’t matter anymore, because a man dressed in camo strolled out of the trees like he was on an afternoon walk, followed by the rest of his team.

“Status?” he asked crisply, obviously evaluating them both as he came closer.

“Where the hell have you been?” Chucks demanded, and Raleigh had to give it to him, because at least the dude was consistent.

“What’s your status?” the security guy repeated, unruffled.

 _Fine_ , Raleigh thought. What he said was somewhat different.  “We’re officially reporting this area as a contamination site.  We need evac for PPDC and civilian personnel, and a Blue strike team deployed immediately.”

He tried to remember what the authorization code was for calling in support like this, which would scramble all assets within communication range, but it’d been a long fucking time since the PPDC had asked its Rangers to be that formal. 

“Nine-zero-alpha-five,” Chuck interjected, and, yeah, that was it. 

The operator gave them a look, but he nodded and got on the radio.  It was clear within moments that he’d already called for evac, but he added their instructions to it.  Rangers had over-riding authority on almost anything kaiju-related, and even if that was only supposed to be exercised when an actual kaiju was involved, the guy didn’t question them.

Another member of the team came up to check them over for injuries, and Chuck cooperated, but he had a question for him.  “Did you guys see something out there?”

“Yeah.  Did you?”

“Yeah.”

“You have any direct contact?”

“My boots.”  

The man pulled out a bottle and sprayed Chuck’s lower legs with it.  It was a Blue neutralizer; he was making sure there was no splatter.  He didn’t ask why these guys were still carrying it in their kits, three years after Pitfall.

Raleigh underwent the same process, but he noticed that the person checking him out had a torn pant leg, with a bandage underneath it.

“What got you?”

The man shrugged.  “Fucked if I know.  Looked like a squirrel, except squirrels aren’t _blue_.  They don’t grab on like a dog humping your leg and bite the shit out of you, either.”

He pointed to a bag he’d set on the ground.  There were smears of blue soaking through the fabric, and an awkward lump in the middle of it.

“Fuck,” Chuck said, and it seemed inadequate, but the medic nodded solemnly.

 The team leader signed off and came over with the news.  There was evac inbound in ten, and they needed to get down the ridge to a clearing wide enough for them to rope out of.  It was about a klick away, past the place where Chuck and Raleigh came up, so there shouldn’t be any problem getting there in time.

“You good to go?” The man was short and dark-haired, with intense eyes and a generally good-natured aura that Chuck was pretty sure was a lie.

“Yeah.” 

“You wanna tell me what you saw?”

After the blue squirrel, you’d think that the carnivorous blue flower wouldn’t be much of a stretch, but it didn’t get much of a reaction until Chuck got to the part about there being a _lot_ of blue flowers, all of which had disappeared underground once they’d been spotted.

“Well, shit,” the medic muttered, and everybody took at least one glance around, looking for spots of color in the shade of the bushes.

“Squirrels and flowers,” an older guy commented, “We get bunnies or kittens out here and I fucking quit.”

Raleigh and Chuck exchanged a glance, but silently agree not to say a word about the rabbits.  Maybe all rabbits were insane sex fiends.  Hell if they’d know.

“Better than a bear,” someone else piped up, and that was enough to get them all moving down the hill, wary and cautious.

Full of their own thoughts, nobody talked on the way down.  The squad automatically spread out, keeping a sharp eye out for the next little monstrosity. This was bad.  The implications were worse.  There was something here fucking up at least some of the wildlife, and it was blue, and they’ve all learned to be afraid of what comes with that color these days.  They have no reason to believe that it was limited to what they’d seen already.

Chuck’s foot throbbed, and he had a hard time not thinking about those things shooting up and grabbing his boot.  It was a fucking flower, but he’d felt that grip right through his boot.  And then there was the sound it made…  Nothing he’d ever heard made noises like that.  He wasn’t afraid, but he was definitely spooked, and his eyes were glued to the ground in front of his own feet.

 _Fuck_ the great outdoors.

He was so transfixed that he didn’t notice everyone else stopping, or see that they’d reached the clearing.  He definitely didn’t see the webbing strung up all around it, hanging from the trees in shrouds so fine that they were barely visible out of the sunlight.  There were layers of it, all around, giving the whole place a misty blue cast, and here and there the stuff even sparkled.  There was no sound here, of birds or anything else.  The squad stopped outside the clearing, the way ahead barred by the delicate gauze, and looked for some sign of anything moving.  Because webbing suggests something that none of them really want to think about just now.

There was nothing moving but Chuck, who was too entranced by what might be underground to see what was in front of him.  In fact, Ranger Hansen was still walking forward, oblivious.

“Hey!”

Raleigh’s voice was loud in the silence, and Chuck startled badly as a hand grabbed his upper arm.  Reacting by instinct, he seized Raleigh’s wrist, turned and jerked him forward and off-balance.  Raleigh stumbled, but he grabbed Chuck for balance, and after that it only took a moment before they were both hitting the webbing stretched across the path ahead.  Raleigh shivered violently as the cool, delicate stuff clung to his back and naked shoulders.

To make the shit-show complete, more sheets of the webbing detached from the branches above and came drifting down to cover them from head to toe.  Of course.  They’re face to face, with only a few inches between them, still tangled in each other, and cut off from the rest of the world by the sparkling gossamer drape.  They were frozen with horror, disbelief, and a great whopping slice of bemusement, because what the fuck is this?

The thought occured to someone who shall remain nameless that they look like a particularly inexplicable gay romance cover.

“Ray?”  Chuck’s voice was soft, almost tentative.

“It’s Raleigh,” Raleigh chided him just as quietly.

“Raleigh?”

“What, Chuck?”

“Tell me there aren’t any huge fucking spiders coming for us right now,” Chuck asked, his tone as close to plaintive as he was probably even capable of.

Raleigh would honestly, with all his heart, love to reassure him that _of course_ there’s no giant blue spiders out here.  Furthermore, he’d like to add, none of this is really happening.  He’s actually back in his quarters on base, drifting off to the dulcet tones of Yancy snoring on the other side of the room.  He was definitely not shirtless, in the boonies, practically hugging an equally shirtless Chuck Hansen in the middle of a giant fucking web, because that sort of thing didn’t happen to rational people.

 _You punch giant monsters in the face for a living_ , a traitorous voice in his head whispered, but Raleigh pushed that away.  Rational.  He was going for rationality here.

He might be feeling a little weird right now, he noticed, a little dizzy and a little warm, and each thought seemed to take an enormous amount of time to get through.  Still, Chuck was right there, with his eyes wide and his face pale, looking for an answer from him, and Raleigh tried to summon up some kind of bullshit to tide him over until they got this stuff off them – and why weren’t they doing that already?  He can’t remember – but it never made it to his mouth.

Instead, he noticed that there was a twisted strand of web that had fallen across Chuck’s brow, delicate but blue enough not to miss.  He wanted to brush it away, but he also really didn’t want to let go of Chuck, and his arms were so heavy now anyway.  A few heartbeats later, the strand seemed to melt into Chuck’s skin, leaving a faint blue stain behind.  It didn’t look like a bruise; it was… pretty.  Except that wasn’t what webs did, was it?  Was it?  He couldn’t remember exactly.  Maybe it was because of how hot Chuck was, because the man was like a furnace, radiating lovely heat from where they touch that rolled up into Raleigh’s bones.  It was such a good ache, he—

It only took a few seconds for the security team to start pulling the stuff off them, careful not to touch it without gloves on the general principle that it was fucking blue.  They could hear the two Rangers speak something to each other, but then they stopped and just stood there, holding on to each other.   That made no sense, but they put it aside until they could get them out.  The stuff tore easily, but there was so much of it that it took them longer than they expected to get to the two of them.

To their credit, none of them actually stopped working when they saw the blue marks on the Rangers’ bare skin, or realized that the webbing was actually melting into their flesh. 

It helped to move the whole process along when both Raleigh and Chuck slumped into each other and slowly toppled to the ground, limbs entwined, apparently unconscious.

“Jesus fucking jumped-up Christ,” quoth the squad leader. 

At that point one of the show’s camera drones shot into the clearing, as if it had been struggling to catch up.  They could almost see the operator assessing the scene and then almost gleefully noticing the passed-out Rangers.  It darted across the open space, webbing trailing from it, as it maneuvered for a close-up.  Half-naked, unconscious Rangers, entwined amidst gossamer shrouds, were going to make for some killer shots.

Alas, the world would never see them.  The heavy branch that knocked the drone out of the air didn’t break the camera, but the size 12 boot that came down on it a few seconds later certainly did.

“Two points,” somebody said, and then the camera recorded no more.

 

 


	2. Sweet Mysteries of Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Details. And the lack thereof.  
> So much dubious science.

Dr. Newton Geiszler, Renaissance man and all-around rock star of Science, was bored out of his skull.

He was also very, very close to admitting that Hermann had been right and he wasn’t cut out for anything resembling academia any more.  Taking a gig as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Exobiology at UC Davis for a semester had seemed like the way to shut the jerk up, and it had, kinda.  It wasn’t like Newt didn’t have the time stored up – he hadn’t actually hadn’t taken more than a couple of days off for the last five years – so teaching for a couple of months had seemed like a good way to get some of that down time people kept talking about while proving Hermann wrong at the same time.  Multitasking!

If only it wasn’t so boring, he’d have been fine.  At first it’d been exciting, because Davis had one of the premiere exobiology departments in the world these days, especially since it had absorbed a lot of Stanford’s faculty, students, and funding after Mutavore had contaminated the campus beyond recovery.  He’d been treated like royalty, and he still got people gaping at him like fish when he walked by.  That was, he had to admit, pretty cool.  The rest of it wasn’t so great.

It hadn’t taken him any time at all to come up with a proposal and syllabus for the class, and he’d done all the power points for his lectures before he’d arrived – he hated sleeping on airplanes.  Most of the really tedious work was being done by TAs, of course.  He really liked the lecturing part, but the student questions were just so dumb.  None of his colleagues here could even keep up with him, either. He kept reminding himself that there was probably no one on earth with experience to match his, so ignorance was a fine excuse, but still…

He was bored.  Talking about Science was great, but he was cut off from actually doing Science here; none of their labs, equipment, or samples were up to his current standards.  Their biggest prize was a section of Yamarashi’s spleen, for Christ’s sake, and they didn’t have enough material on-hand for him to even demonstrate how he’d determined they were clones.  It wasn’t like there was a shortage of kaiju samples out there, right?  _Right?_

And the sheer amount of paperwork these people wanted from him!  A lot of it was _actually_ paper!  What kind of barbarians still used real paper?  It was insane. 

Despite constantly checking up on the people running his lab at home, and the ongoing low-intensity arguing he and Hermann did no matter where they were, across any mediums necessary, Newt was booooored.

It was the end of a long, hot summer in the California farm lands, and just walking from hall to hall made him sweat.  Fantastic. 

He sat at the desk in the lecture hall, drooping from inadequate air-conditioning and a slowly creeping sense of defeat, and watched as students drifted in.  They were all sleep-deprived and enthusiastic, and he wondered if he should teach the class in Mandarin today, just to mess with them.  He wasn’t a big fan of Mandarin, but he could probably get by in it, considering how many words he’d have to borrow from English anyway.

In the midst of his reverie, he realized that the class had grown quiet, so he glanced up at the clock and saw that the time had, indeed, come.  With a sigh, he stood up and brought up his first powerpoint on the massive screen overhead, then put his headset on.

“So, okay,” he chirped into the mike, beginning to warm to his favorite subject despite himself.  “Today we’re gonna talked about kaiju reproduction!”

Forty-five minutes later, when he was really getting into the meat of the matter and had paused to tell them that almost all jaeger pilots had asked him at some point or other if kaiju had dicks, he was interrupted by the hall doors opening.  He hated being interrupted, because it was so hard to regain his train of thought afterwards, so he scowled fiercely at the intruders, who turned out to be administrators in rumpled suits.

“I’m so sorry to interrupt,” one of them began, hurrying towards him, “but this is really quite important, Doctor Geiszler.”

Great.  More bureaucratic bullshit!  He would definitely remember if he’d given up his US citizenship, so how that rumor about needing a work visa got started, he didn’t even know.  Stubbornly, he refused to move away from the lectern, because this was his class, damnit, even if he was sick of teaching it, and nobody was going to just waltz in—

“There’s a _helicopter_ on the lawn outside the environmental sciences building,” one of them hissed at him. 

Newt blinked rapidly, trying to figure out how that could possibly be his fault.

“And there are armed soldiers!  On campus!””  He stared at her, wondering if she was having some kind of episode. 

And that was when the PPDC strike troopers came through the doors.  They were, in fact, armed and in full gear, which even Newt knew was a little excessive.

“Dr. Newton Geiszler!” the commander boomed.  “You are being recalled by order of Marshal Hansen.  We are here to escort you.”

The English language did not contain a word for the exact quality of silence that followed, filling the whole room.  Mortified, perhaps.  Stunned.  Outraged. Deliciously scandalized.  Highly expectant.  Nervous.

Everyone in the room, possibly everyone on campus, or, hell, the entire state of California stared at Newt, waiting.

He knew that all of this was unnecessary, and he knew that Hansen didn’t particularly like him, which probably explained the armed strike troopers.  However, he also knew that the Marshal respected the hell out of his abilities, and that meant there probably was something important going on.  He was needed, obviously.

Also, from the expression on the administrators’ faces, his time here was probably at an end anyway. 

“Let’s get my gear and go,” he told the PPDC team, leading the way. 

He should have summoned a few words to say to the class or the people who’d invited him to come here and who were now going to have to deal with this mess, but his mind was already on other things.  Several dozen of them.  All at once.

There was Science to be done.

The commander nodded to the chief administrator before turning to follow.  “Ma’am.”

She hurried after him, and when they were out of earshot of any students, she asked him if there was an emergency, something she needed to prepare the school for.  She knew she wouldn’t get all the answers she wanted, but she felt she had to make an effort.

“Ma’am, with his skillset there’s probably a thousand different things that he’s the only one qualified for.  The doc is one of a kind,” he told her, managing to be reassuring without providing any information whatsoever.

She watched them leave, having bundled him and his few belonging into the helo.

One of a kind.  Well, that was true.

It was not the term she would have used for him, but she was too professional to let any of those slip out.

********

Yancy Becket looked like shit.

He was on his third cup of coffee this morning, which meant that he was still exhausted but now also jittery, and he fell into his chair like a man collapsing into a safety net.  Sprawled out gracelessly and holding his cup close to his chest, he sighed before asking the room the single most important question he could think of.

“Why,” he demanded sternly, with great emphasis, “is he _still dreaming about spiders_?”

Beside him, at the head of the table, an equally haggard Herc Hansen nodded and looked at the men and women, present or on video link, who surrounded the conference table.

After an awkward pause, one of the doctors cleared his throat.  “Well, there was the webbing…”

“You are missing the point.  You said you were letting them wake up three days ago.  Yet Raleigh still had a dream this morning about spiders the size of cats chasing him through Disneyland.  Why is he still _asleep_?” Yancy demanded, looking as threating as a man with that little sleep could. 

“Oh, is he arachnophobic?” someone on another continent asked brightly.

“No, but _I_ am,” Herc growled, “and Chuck is mirroring his dreams, goddamnit, so it would be fucking ace if either of them could wake up soon.”

Maybe two-thirds of them winced in a way that meant they understood the threat of imminent, gruesome death they were facing.  The others were distracted.

“What do you mean by ‘mirroring’, sir?”

Herc shot Yancy a look.  “Am I hallucinating, or did we not already have six hours’ worth of meetings about this already?”

“Maybe seven,” Yancy said morosely.  Then he took a breath, straightened up, and leaned forward.  “No one knows why their dreams are in sync.  We are getting them because-- Is there really anyone here who’s not clear on the many delightful side-effects of ghost drifting?  Okay?  Then shut the _fuck_ up.  _Why is my brother not awake yet?_ ”

People often seemed to forget that the Beckets, cheerful, sarcastic, and occasionally obnoxious, could flash from melodramatic to ice cold in seconds, even though it wasn’t even that rare a thing.  Yancy didn’t pound on the table or make any overt demonstration of anger, but they got it.  Looks were exchanged and tablets were messed with, and then a display flickered up on the far wall, showing a current view of the other Rangers Becket and Hansen, lying unconscious in their shared room, with graphics of their vitals overlaid. 

“There’s been no significant change in either Ranger’s condition since we determined that they can’t be separated.   The heart arrhythmia, rapid breathing, elevated blood pressure, and other symptoms haven’t made a reappearance since we moved them into the same room together, and it appears that they’ve normalized in every way but one.  They’ve gone from unconsciousness to actual sleep, and, as far as we can tell, it’s fairly normal sleep, except for the frequency of dreaming,” a tall, stately woman reported, not bothering to check her notes.  She knew this stuff by heart – she was the PPDC’s chief medical officer and had been personally overseeing the case – but she felt obligated to sure everybody else at the meeting was up to date.

“So wake them up,” Herc said flatly, because he already knew what condition Becket and his son were in, practically had it memorized, and he was too fucking tired to go over this all again.

“They’re not responding to mild stimulus.  We’re afraid that anything stronger will trigger the same kind of panic response we saw earlier when they were separated.  I’m not going to risk giving one of them a heart attack,” the woman replied, equally flatly.  She was the chief PPDC medical officer, and seemed to be happy to get down to it with him.

Yancy winced, remembering his brother convulsing in his bed, one hand twisted in the front of Yancy’s shirt as their ghost drift flooded with panic.  It hadn’t taken too long to figure out that putting more than four feet between Raleigh and Chuck triggered the same reaction, even though neither of them had been conscious.  It’d been terrifying, and Yancy still had bruises from where Raleigh’s fingers had caught his skin beneath the fabric.

He could almost feel Herc reliving the same experience with Chuck.

“Are they stable as they are right now?” one of the other doctors asked, and it sparked a discussion around the table.

Details like feeding tubes and IV solutions were discussed and Yancy tuned out a little.  He could feel Raleigh in the drift even now, a low, soothing presence that communicated nothing but warmth and sleep.  It was comforting, but also a pain in the ass, because Yancy needed a nap in the worst way, and Raleigh’s contentment wasn’t helping.  He felt like he was going to slip into a coma at any moment now.

“Hey!”

The voice came from somewhere else, and it was off-camera, but the video feed carried that high-pitched note of outrage perfectly.  It was like a drill in Yancy’s ear.

The squabble that followed was mercifully brief.  Victorious, Newton Geiszler stepped in front of the camera.  He was wearing sunglasses and a Florida Marlins t-shirt several sizes too large for him, but there was zero chance of mistaking him for anyone else, especially once he started talking.

“Okay!  So hey, guys, hi, what you need to do is put them together.  I mean, not just the same room, but the same bed, okay?”

He was in Colorado, at the containment site, which was several hundred square miles surrounded by US military units, the Colorado National Guard, a big contingent of UN people, and probably a thousand restless media people, who kept sending up camera drones that kept being mysteriously shot down.   It was the PPDC’s show, however, and Geiszler was essentially in charge of everything that was Science-related.  He seemed to be having an exciting time of it, considering the bandage on his forehead, and no one really thought he was wearing that shirt out of anything but necessity.  He was also practically vibrating out of his skin, which his colleagues recognized as a sign that he was on to something.

“And what is that going to accomplish, exactly?”  Herc’s deep voice was cool and commanding, and it seemed to draw Newt into the moment, making him straighten up and clear his throat like any other professional giving a report at an important meeting.  Yancy knew exactly where it came from and suppressed a smile. The guy was convinced that Herc was holding a grudge about being called a fascist while his son was at the Breach, and if he was afraid of any human being, it was Herc.

“I think that skin to skin contact might be beneficial in ending this stage of the infection,” Newt explained.  “Not that we really understand how this works in humans, but if it follows the same broad pattern that it does in other species, giving them a chance to reproduce might get them out of this phase.”

There was silence following this, almost long enough for the edges of Newt’s smile to start fraying.

“Assuming you’re aware that both my son and Ranger Becket are male, let’s ignore that for now, and start with the basics,” Herc ordered, his tone really rather mild, all things considered.

Yancy shot a look at him and wished he hadn’t, because Bafflement and Annoyance were two of his favorite Herc faces, and the man was wearing them both now.  It wasn’t fair that he should be so adorable right now, when Yancy couldn’t take the time to appreciate it.

He scrubbed a hand over his face.  Jesus, maybe he really did have it as bad for Herc as Raleigh claimed.  It wasn’t his fault though, when he’d finally gotten Herc alone and kissed him just a couple of days ago.  Chuck and Raleigh had been freezing their asses off in the forest or whatever, and Yancy had made his move.  Nothing in the goddamned world had felt as good as the moment when Herc had growled, pushed him up against the wall, and kissed the breath right out of him.

 _Focus, Becket_ , he ordered himself.  

Then Newt started talking again, and he almost, kinda, forget how close he was sitting to Herc for a while.

*******

“The first thing you need to understand is, this isn’t anything new.  There were a scattering of these contamination sites found along the west coast of North America and South America after the first two kaiju hit, but they were eradicated pretty quickly, and we stopped seeing them when the kaiju started coming regularly.

The second thing is, this isn’t designed for humans.  I’m not sure it’s actually designed for anything on Earth, really, because it’s kind of clumsy, and the whole thing never got any better at its job, it never evolved like the kaiju did.  It didn’t have much impact, and the whole thing kind of got put on the backburner when the war ramped up.”

“What is ‘it’, exactly?  Details,” Herc prodded him.

“Uh, well, what it is, is a system.  For creating versions of Terran lifeforms that can connect to the kaiju hivemind.”

There was a murmur around the table, but Yancy was the only one who spoke up.  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He sure as hell didn’t remember being told about this kind of bullshit in his briefings, and Rangers were pretty much at the top of the food chain for kaiju and jaeger info.

Newt stared at the screen for a few moments, possibly remembering that Yancy Becket was still deeply unimpressed with his kaiju ink and had been happy to tell him that to his face before.

“Go on,” Herc encouraged his flustered scientist, silencing his own side of the video link with a look.

“So, on one hand, it’s just amazing, and I mean, it shouldn’t even work as well as it does, because our biology is so different from theirs.  It’s almost a perfect viral mutagen, and it can infect almost anything, and I mean anything, from insects to fish to mammals to trees, whatever you’ve got.  When it’s successful, it causes a chain of physiological mutations, starting at the level of DNA, to make it capable of connecting on some level with other infected creatures, which as a whole can connect to the hivemind, if it’s strong enough.”

“That’s…” one of the doctors began, but Newt verbally overran him.

“I know, right?!  It’s just fucking cool,” he enthused, almost perfectly oblivious to the rest of his audience.  “The thing is, that level of change is gonna be fatal to most lifeforms on Earth.  So here’s the brilliant part – it pushes its victims to pair-bond, reproduce and pass both the existing changes and the mutagen itself to its offspring.  With each generation, the changes become more profound.  Give it enough time, and you can end up with something very different from what you started with.  I mean, that’s how you end up with carnivorous flowers, right?”

He pushed his glasses up.

“Under perfect conditions, this thing should have been unstoppable.”

“Any why isn’t it?” Herc asked.

“Because, and here’s the other hand, once you get past the infection stage, it just doesn’t work very well.  It looks like it requires physical contact to spread, for one thing, which limits it quite a bit.  A lot of the carriers die before reproducing, and a lot more just dump the virus, repair the damage, and don’t pass anything on.  The success rate’s even worse with more complex animals, and we’ve only got four humans on record that were successfully infected.  The security guy who got bit by the death metal squirrel isn’t showing any signs of infection at all. Of the previous four, two pair-bonded, but there were no pregnancies.  Their viral load started decreasing, and maybe they would have been fine in the end, but we’ll never know.”

“Why not?”

“Because all of the research on this was done in a special containment facility on Torishima, and the whole island was wiped clear when Onibaba came through.  No one built another facility because the contamination sites had stopped showing up by then, and everything was all about fighting the kaiju.”

“Great,” Yancy muttered.

“So, from what I can tell, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here, Raleigh and Chuck have already bonded, and you’re gonna want to put them as close together as possible.  Let ‘em do, you know, whatever.  And hopefully, that will be enough to wake them up.”

“You keep using the term ‘bonding’.  What exactly are you talking about?” the woman across from Yancy asked.  She’d been on Medical staff for long enough for him to remember her asking him to bend over and cough more than once, and, hey, wasn’t that a great thing to remember someone by?

Good question, though.

“Also,” Herc interjected before Newt could do much more than open his mouth, “Back up.  If it’s so hard to get infected with this, how did they get it?  Rangers have some of the most boosted immune systems in the world.”

“Look, I don’t have all the answers here yet.  The old data is scattered all over the place, and I’m not even sure it was all that great to begin with.  As far as I can tell, they just need to be kept together, okay?  They’ll work themselves out.”

Failing to answer that question almost entirely, he immediately switched to something he was more comfortable with.

“I think really this site has been here a long time.  It just hasn’t spread because it’s fairly isolated, and the whole area has been in a severe drought for over a decade now, but almost everything in the immediate area is heavily infected.  I don’t know why the guys were doing their topless fashion model thing, but all that skin and their close contact at the time mean they probably got a heavy dose of a virus that’s been very slowly changing across the lifespans of dozens of species with short life-cycles.”

Silence settled over everyone again.  Herc’s sigh was audible as he scrubbed a hand over his eyes.

“The latest report says we’ve got containment well underway, yeah?”

“We’ve got the site closed off at a hundred miles in every direction, and we’re burning out the perimeter, as well as spraying for anything airborne.  Before we can sterilize the rest of the site, we need to find the original vector.  We need to know how this got so far from land and went undetected for so long,” a woman in a PPDC Security uniform reported.

“Good.  Have we got the film crew and the production company sods under wraps?  I want to know how they thought this, of all places, was the perfect spot for the show.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep me updated.  Medical, move them together unless there’s some actual reason not to, and advise me when it’s done.  Newt?”

“Yeah?”

“I really fucking hate to say this, but take whatever samples you actually need and ship ‘em back here under the tightest security you can round up.  If there’s one of these shit holes out there, there’s probably another somewhere else, and we might as well do our homework.”  He scanned the room.  “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Yancy piped up.  “Are there actual giant blue spiders out there, or what?”

“Uh, well, the actual stuff they were caught in looks like webbing and acts like it, but it looks like it’s coming from the trees themselves, as if they were spinning sap or something.  It’s amazing, really. But, yeah, there’s probably blue spiders out here somewhere.”

“That’s not really all that comforting.”

“Dude,” Newt confided, leaning close to the camera.  “You aren’t even kidding.”

“Alright, let’s wrap it up,” Herc said loudly.  “Anything else?”

There wasn’t.  The level of communication between the people in charge of this situation had made the meeting almost superfluous anyway as far as information went – most it had just been an opportunity to make sure they were all on the same page. 

“Dismissed.”

As people gathered their stuff up and began to leave, Herc caught Yancy’s eye and jerked his head toward the door, indicating that Yancy should follow him.  Yancy did, yawning behind his hand, as Herc took the corridors towards the living areas, avoiding LOCCENT altogether.   He wasn’t too tired to notice, just too much so to ask questions.  When Herc stopped at one of the doors, Yancy nearly walked right into him.  He blinked and started to apologize, but Herc silenced him with a quick and unexpected kiss.

“Really?” he asked, smiling.

And then Herc pushed him roughly up against the wall, holding his head in both hands so that he had complete control of the next kiss.  It was the most intense kiss Yancy had ever had, deep and encompassing, and he’d never – he’d never been overwhelmed by anyone else before, pinned and held tight like this until Herc was done with him.

By the time Herc had finished savoring him and drawn back to gage his reaction, Yancy seemed nearly dazed, his eyes so wide that Herc couldn’t help but laugh softly.  And kiss the man again.  Not for as long as he wanted, but long enough to satisfy himself for the moment.

“Just wanted to make sure you knew that I was still game,” Herc whispered, except with a voice as deep as his, the words just came out as a low rumble, and Yancy couldn’t keep from shivering.  A full body shiver that Herc absolutely felt.

Yancy blinked up at him, his pupils blown, his lips wet and slightly reddened, and Herc had to put his hands on his shoulders and push the man away a little, just to get some air between them, because, Jesus _Christ_ , no one should be that pretty.  For a few moments, Yancy was quite still, enough to start to worry Herc, who felt his confidence begin to drain away.

“I’m sorry,” he started, letting go. “My timing’s always been shit—“

Yancy stopped him, covering his mouth with one hand.  “I’m in,” he said with a slow smile. “As long as you can keep kissing me like that.”

Herc pulled him close again, mostly because he could.  “I think I can manage that.”

Suddenly that full Becket grin came back, sly and charming and nearly irresistible.  Herc was in so much trouble with this guy.

“Besides, if this doesn’t wake Chuck up, nothing will,” Yancy quipped, and maybe, if enough time hadn’t passed since Pitfall, and Herc was still hurting over almost losing his son, that would have hit a raw nerve.  Yancy was a good judge, though, and Herc smiled.

“Was he really that much of a pain in the ass?” 

Yancy just rolled his eyes.  Chuck’s cock-blocking skills were legendary to everybody but Herc, who somehow had missed that his own son was protecting his virtue.  The revelation had made Herc laugh until Yancy had elbowed him in the ribs, his tolerance for putting up with Hansen shit on that particular matter a little low.

Herc had promised him it wouldn’t happen again, and now, after another soft kiss, he promised it again.

“He better not,” Yancy grumbled.  “Now that I know what I’d be missing, I’m not giving up again.”

Herc slung an arm around his waist and urged him up the steps to what Yancy suddenly realized was his own door.  Before he could ask, Herc stepped up behind him, pressing close and blowing the door code right out of Yancy’s brain. 

“Cleared your schedule.  I need you to get some sleep while you can.  Promise I’ll come get you before they move them,” Herc rumbled, brushing his lips across Yancy’s nape before stepping back down.

“You think I’m gonna sleep now?” Yancy asked archly, one eyebrow raised. 

Herc met his gaze steadily, waiting until the inevitable happened and Yancy yawned.  Hugely.  Glaring at his smirking -- boyfriend?  Boss? -- with watery eyes, he eventually managed to get his door code punched in and his door open.  “Doesn’t prove anything,” he grumbled before yawning again.

“Get in there, Becket.  At least one of us needs to have their wits about them.”

“Aye aye, Marshal.” Yancy saluted sharply, despite the fact that Rangers didn’t say “aye”, and shut the door firmly between them.  Not before hearing Herc laugh, though.

Yancy looked around his empty room, grinned, and pumped his fist in the air dramatically.  _Fuck yes._

There was hope for Raleigh, and Herc was up for it.  Yancy was going to take what happiness he could get, because his gut told him he was going to need it.  It was a survival skill from way back in the day, something he’d worked on after Richard had abandoned them, but consciously knowing he was doing it didn’t make it any less effective.

He kicked off his boots and crawled into bed, knowing better than to look a gift nap in the mouth.  Deliberately, he reached out to Raleigh, hoping he wasn’t dreaming about anything disturbing for once, and found the calm blue warmth of the drift immediately.  No nightmares, no dreams, just Raleigh.  Letting himself sink into the connection, he easily fell asleep; no amount of caffeine in the world was proof against that kind of comfort.

On the edge of consciousness, it occurred to him that Geiszler hadn’t really explained what pair bonding was, but by then he was too far under to fight back, and it slipped away with the rest of the world.

*******

He woke up slowly, stretching in the warmth.  He ached everywhere, terribly and deliciously, and his muscles burned as he used them.

He smiled, his eyes still shut, and reached out blindly, knowing that this time he wasn’t alone.  He’d been alone before, and it’d been agony.  He shuddered lightly, remembering, and an arm reached out to slip around his waist, drawing him close to a warm and welcoming body. 

He knew him.  Knew everything about him, except all the details that needed a voice to express them.  Everything else he was sure of.  He was strong and fierce and loyal, and tenderhearted, and he was a hero.  He was so lucky to have him here, to be able to touch him, to run his hands over all that scarred and perfect skin.

He sighed and settled close, breathing in his warm scent.  There was no place better than this, no place he belonged more than here, with _him_.

Still, he could feel the press of a distant mind against his own, sliding perfectly into a well-worn groove in his consciousness, and he was glad of it.  It was familiar and treasured, making him feel loved, and he pushed affection towards it.  He wanted nothing more than to stay here, listening to the even breaths of the man next to him, and drowsing in the perfect warmth, but there was always a place for that other mind, forever and always.

He was just where he needed to be.

Except that there was something he was supposed to do.  He tried to remember what it was, but it wasn’t something he could fence in with words.  It was like an itch that needed to be scratched, or the restlessness he sometimes felt when he’d been sitting still for too long, when he needed to punch something or work up a decent sweat.  It was a compulsion to do… something.  He almost had it.

Then the man in his arms turned to look at him, smiling softly, and when their eyes met, he got it.  It was simple.  Blue swam in their blood now, didn’t it? It was a gift, bringing them so close to each other, but it came with an imperative: _multiply_.  There was no way to get a child on his bondmate, but there was another mind connected to his, wasn’t there?  He didn’t need to touch skin to pass the gift along.  All he needed was to… to _push_ …

Exhausted, he slipped back into slumber, unaware of the rush of people coming into the room, only knowing that his bondmate was safe, and that the other mind was dreaming now, the drift pulsing blue as the sky between them.

*******

In his sleep, Yancy smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! This sort of got away from me. This was supposed to be a simple filthy sex pollen fic, and it sort of grew a plot when I wasn't looking. Then I had to invent science for it. I'm not sure I'm any good at inventing science. 
> 
> Here we are anyway. Just handwave it and think happy thoughts!


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